Archive for the ‘Psychology’ Category

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The cooties of kidlore in couples counseling

May 28, 2026

The Wayno / Piraro Bizarro of 5/26:


A Wayno Psychiatrist cartoon, this time with couples therapy in which the couples’s conflicts are referred to the attitudes of their inner children, one of whom is said to be infected with the dreaded cooties of childlore (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Wayno says there are 5 in this strip — see this Page)

It’s likely that some of my readers will find this one-sentence summary of the cartoon’s content to be simply incomprehensible — because the two central terms in all of this belong to specialized vocabularies — cooties from American childlore; and inner child from pop-psychological therapy-talk.

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Posted in Childhood, Comic conventions, Linguistics in the comics, Pop culture, Psychology | Leave a Comment »

You just don’t know that you don’t know

March 3, 2026

The phenomenon, from Wikipedia:

The Dunning–Kruger effect is a cognitive bias that describes the systematic tendency of people with low ability in a specific area to give overly positive assessments of this ability. The term may also describe the tendency of high performers to underestimate their skills. It was first described by the psychologists David Dunning and Justin Kruger in 1999. In popular culture, the Dunning–Kruger effect is sometimes misunderstood as claiming that people with low intelligence are generally overconfident, instead of describing the specific overconfidence of people unskilled at particular areas.

As then in my mail recently, as a benefit of my being a member of the American Academy: “Why Do Fools Think They Are Wise? Should the Wise Believe Themselves to Be the Fool?” (a conversation between new American Academy member David Dunning and Academy President Laurie L. Patton about the Dunning-Kruger effect), Bulletin of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences Winter 2026, pp. 44-57.

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Posted in Academic life, Cognitive Science, Psychology | 3 Comments »

The megalomania of a small penis

February 24, 2026

(Well, all about penises and what men think about their own and other guys’, so edgy for many people — but mostly clinical in content and tone, not at all raunchy)

Stephan Pastis’s Pearls Before Swine strip of  2/24, about what we might call little-dick grandiosity — the common belief that megalomania is (in general) a compensation for having a small penis:


There is in fact no evidence for this idea; and we might legitimately question whether there are any actual cases of little-dick grandiosity, as I put it so crudely above, at all

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Posted in Language and medicine, Language and the body, Language of sex, Linguistics in the comics, Psychology | Leave a Comment »

Working through

September 24, 2025

Creeping up on more difficult topics from my life history (along the lines of my 9/22 posting “Former Gifted Child”), here near-suicidal depression and bit of accompanying PTSD that’s still with me, almost 65 years later. The topics came up in an exchange with an old friend, a colleague in linguistics, and has finally moved me to talk about them on this blog, though the whole story is so long and complex — and throws up provocations to thought that hadn’t occurred to me before —  that I’ll have to just jump in and write up chunks of it as best I can, building up the larger story.

The trigger was this 9/15 e-mail from my friend, who I’ll refer to as L (for linguist):

I only now checked your recent blog posts and found a mention of your work at the Reading Eagle [AZ: the afternoon and Sunday newspaper in Reading PA, where I worked from 1958 to 1961], where you stayed on even while studying at Princeton.  All that work must have been a lot, though maybe something you handled by not wasting time on the more typical undergraduate frivolities.

And I jumped in with this answer to L:

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Posted in Language and medicine, Music, My life, Princeton, Psychology, Work | Leave a Comment »

Former Gifted Child

September 22, 2025

Now coming by me on Facebook every so often, this mock ad for a cosplay costume:


There is of course no Spirit costume supplier; the ad is a total invention, serving as a vehicle to heap scorn on adults who were gifted children / (child) prodigies — I’ll call them g/ps for short —  in one of the four ways Americans spew hostility towards these kids and the adults they become

I was a g/p, and I need to trust someone pretty solidly before I’ll expose my childhood to them. I’m adept at dealing with hostility towards me as a faggot, but the hostility towards me as a former gifted child is hard to cope with; it feels like a contemptuous assault on a defenseless little kid, the one who became the me I am now. But I’m working on unearthing the skeletons in my life history, including this one, in the hope that my openness will help others.

Now: the topic of g/ps is far too complex to do justice to in one posting. This is just a beginning. And, as always, there’s some background to get through.

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Posted in Childhood, Costumes, My life, Psychology, Reading | 8 Comments »

After years, the thin-skinned injustice collector extracts his revenge

May 3, 2025

Today is both Opal Armstrong Zwicky’s college graduation day — 🎓 that’s a mortarboard — and also Kentucky Derby day — 🏇🏼 that’s a jockey on horseback. It also seems to be Rain Day, in both Pittsburgh and Louisville. In any case, two occasions packed with sentiment for me.

(Opal’s graduation from Pitt is straightforward on the sentiment front, but the Derby might need some explanation: Ann Walcutt Daingerfield (later Zwicky) was born — to a celebrated family of owners, breeders, and trainers of thoroughbreds — on Derby Day in 1937, and her father, Keene Daingerfield, ended his working life as the senior state steward for thoroughbred racing in the commonwealth of Kentucky, serving as a judge overseeing racing at both Keeneland in Lexington and Churchill Downs in Louisville. Note: Ann died in 1985, Keene in 1993.)

I hope to post separately about today’s Derby and about my odd long-ago life in the elite social world of central Kentucky and in the complex culture of thoroughbred racing. But today I bring you something completely different, an especially fine Bizarro cartoon, one that comes with a sting.

The 4/30 Bizarro “Chief Petty Officer” (to which Wayno gave the alternative title “Pulling Rank”):


After years, the thin-skinned injustice collector extracts his revenge (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Wayno says there are only 2 in this strip, and they’re easy to find — see this Page)

My comment on Facebook when Wayno posted this cartoon:

— And this is, who would’ve thought it, a political cartoon. A pointed one.

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Posted in Language and politics, Linguistics in the comics, Memes, Psychology | Leave a Comment »

Apostrophobia

November 16, 2024

Wayno’s Bizarro for 11/8 — yes, I am hopelessly overwhelmed with posting material, wondering whether I’ll ever catch up; on the other hand, my health has taken a turn back to normal awful, which I’m entirely able to cope with — is a Psychiatrist strip in which the patient is said to be suffering from (in fact, cowering behind the therapeutic couch in the grips of) the fear of contractions:


Of the types of traditionally-labeled “contractions” in English, the patient here — call him NoA — seems to exhibit sensitivity specifically to just one, now known in the linguistic literature as Auxiliary Reduction, AuxRed for short (in I am > I’m, I had > I’d, and you are > you’re), though in fact Wayno sees NoA’s sensitivity as triggered by all occurrences of the punctuation mark the apostrophe, of which there are a great many types — hence Wayno’s title for this cartoon, “Punctuation Trepidation” (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Wayno says there are 7 in this strip — see this Page)

Now if this is NoA’s affliction, he’s in for a world of trouble, because in modern English spelling the apostrophe is used as an abstract mark for possessive forms of nominals — singular in someone’s cat and the queen of England’s hat, plural in the boys’ bat — a visual mark accompanying the possessive S; but while the the letter S in such forms corresponds to phonological content, the apostrophe neither represents phonological content nor indicates a place where some phonological content is omitted. So, how does  NoA know that /sʌm.wǝnz.kæt/ in some sense has an apostrophe in it and he should cringe in fear at it?

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Posted in Comic conventions, Language processing, Linguistics in the comics, Perception, Possession, Psycholinguistics, Psychology, Singular & plural, Spelling, Style and register, Variation, Writing conventions | 1 Comment »

IMMIGRANTS EAT OUR DOGS

September 12, 2024

So reads a sign — a genuine sign, not an achievement of digital image-making — reproduced widely on Facebook in the past two days:


(#1) The sign at the Wiener Circle / Wieners Circle / Wiener’s Circle, 2622 N. Clark St., Chicago IL 60614; two things about it — its’s a joke, a pun dogs (short for hot dogs ‘frankfurters’) on dogs ‘domestic canines’; and it’s a piece of political mockery

A mockery of Grabpussy, in the US Presidential debates on 9/10, who cited as fact preposterous on-line rumor stories, among them that Haitian immigrants in Springfield OH are preying on people’s pets, eating their dogs and cats — thus painting immigrants as dangerous invaders, monstrous inhuman beasts.

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Posted in Compounds, Language and food, Language and politics, Linguists, Logos, Naming, Philosophy, Princeton, Psychology, Puns, Signage, Trade names | 2 Comments »

Perfecto Fancy-Boy

June 24, 2024

Perfecto Fancy-Boy, the Dingburg psychoanalyst, analyzes the appeal of Helmet Grabpussy in today’s Zippy the Pinhead strip:


(#1) Grabpussy’s real name is suppressed above, as too indecent to mention, even on this blog; but what grabbed me first in this strip was the name Perfecto Fancy-Boy for the psychoanalyst — a name that is most unlikely to have ever been given to any actual person, but is instead a pure creation of Zippy‘s cartoonist Bill Griffith

Zippy is a savorer of words and phrases. (He is also the playful lord of nonsensicality, call him Absurdo.) He has favorite names — Ashtabula, Estonia, Valvoline, Ding-Dongs, taco sauce, and more, treasured just for the way they sound, not for what they refer to; the Talking Heads album Stop Making Sense could have been named in his honor.

And he’s forever latching onto random expressions whose sound enchants him, so that he repeats them for pleasure, like mantras — what Griffy, the cartoon avatar of Bill Griffith, calls onomatomania. (There’s a Page on this blog about my postings on chants, cheers, mantras, and onomatomania.)

Then there’s Griffith’s choice of names for his characters — like Perfecto Fancy-Boy. No doubt intentionally crafted to some degree, but also to some degree pulled out of thin air, from Griffith’s subconscious, picked because they “sounded good”. I’m in no position to say which part is which, so here I’ll just unearth some possible ingredients in the name Perfecto Fancy-Boy, specifically in this name referring to a psychoanalyst.

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Posted in Art, French, German, Language play, Lexicography, Linguistics in the comics, Names, Nonsense, Psychology, Puns, Writers, Writing | 1 Comment »

Their mortal anxieties captured in a picture

June 13, 2023

In a Psychiatrist cartoon by Oren Bernstein in the New Yorker of 6/12/23:


(#1) The patient flopped on the therapeutic couch is a despondent octopus [6/14: oh dear, apparently a squid rather than an octopus; later on 6/14: not exactly a squid either (see comments) — so an OSB cephalopod, of a previously unreported species]; the analyst has presented the cephalopod with  a Rorschach inkblot (designed as a projective psychological test), which has aroused the patient’s deepest fears, of fleeing the pursuit of death

I know, you don’t see the savagery of an attacking shark, but then you’re not an octopus [or squid].

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Posted in Cartoonists, Comic conventions, Linguistics in the comics, Psychology | 4 Comments »

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